Page 10 of Delta Force Defender

Some forty or so hours after she’d left Spokane and still hadn’t seen anyone coming for her, she bought a cell phone from a convenience store in Galveston, Texas. She punched in a number she knew by heart and waited to get kicked into voice mail. She typed in the code and held her breath—but there was no message.

No message didn’t necessarily mean anything.

Then again, it could mean the worst had already happened.

By this point, Caradine was rocking her blond wig again. She’d taken the time to curl her hair, Texas style, in a truck stop near Waco with a water bottle and a hand dryer. And she’d traded one junker car for another in Houston. Still, she felt ridiculously exposed and obvious, out there on the Historic Pleasure Pier on Galveston Island. She shoved the cell phone into her pocket and headed back toward the parking lot where she’d left her car, forcing herself to slow down to an unmemorableamble in the oppressive heat and humidity, the way someone who wasn’t afraid for her life would walk.

When she reached her car, she climbed back in, drove back onto the mainland, and headed west. Four hours in, she was too delirious to make sense of the road, so she crashed in a motel near San Antonio. Eight hours of dreamless sleep later, she felt like a new person and celebrated with pink hair again. Then she settled in for a hot, arid twenty-hour drive west.

She found another motel in Riverside, California, and called the same number again when she was barricaded in her room with the AC set up to a dull roar. This time, she left a message. One word.

The next morning, she left the cell phone in pieces in the Dumpster behind her motel, got back in her junky car, and drove north. And east. For three thousand miles, give or take.

One very long week after her life in Alaska had gone up in flames, Caradine staggered out of her car in a picturesque tourist town on the coast of Maine. The kind of place no version of her would ever go, for any reason.

The lovely seaside town of Camden was three hours or so from Boston, but might as well have been on another planet from the life she remembered there. And it was June. A town on any stretch of the Atlantic coast was filled with tourists this time of year. A whole lot more tourists than ever showed up on a Southeast Alaskan island set off the Inside Passage cruise ship route. There was always the chance that someone might come for her on a busy, happy street or along the much-photographed waterfront, but she thought it was a small one. Along the same lines, she paid too much for a room with bay windows overlooking the harbor, in an adorable bed-and-breakfast that reminded her of the Blue Bear Inn in Grizzly Harbor—

“For God’s sake,” she snapped at herself, staringaround the fussy room done up in overt blues, yellows, and whites. “Let it go.”

Something she’d been telling herself for three thousand miles.

She took care of a few practical considerations, almost by rote. She checked the windows and took care to memorize what she could see from them. Then she crawled into the center of the full bed, curled herself in a ball on the floral bedspread, and slept for a long, long time.

When Caradine woke, she was disoriented.

It was night. And it took her several beats to remember where she was. How she’d gotten here, zigzagging this way and that, driving like a maniac on very little sleep and entirely too much caffeine and sugared-up anxiety, all over the country.

She was still a little bit addled from the road. That had to be why her heart was cartwheeling around and slamming against her ribs.

But in the next breath, she knew better.

Because a shadow detached itself from the wall at the foot of her bed.

Caradine launched herself up and onto her feet, grabbing for the .45 she kept beneath her pillow while her body readied itself—

But she recognized him almost as quickly.

“Isaac.”

She sucked in the breath that had nearly been a scream, but she didn’t drop her gun. Because it was Isaac, all right, but that didn’t make him safe.

He had never been safe.

“Put the gun down,” he advised her, in that genial way of his that she’d never believed. And didn’t now.

“I’ll pass on that, thank you.”

She reached behind her, not dumb enough to shift her gaze from him, and found the lamp beside the bed. And glared at him when all the buttery light did was makehim look even more dangerous and powerful than usual. Shadowed and gleaming and, damn him, gorgeous.

“I could have taken it while you were blinking, Caradine.”

She believed him, but she sniffed. “Yet you didn’t.”

“Consider it a courtesy.”

His eyes were still that mysterious, impossible gray, and something about them looked silver tonight. His features hadpredatorstamped all over them, and though he wore that beard to hide the truth of who he was, it had never fooled her. She’d never trusted his easy smile or the general amiable demeanor he played at whenever he was in public, because she knew exactly who he was. She always had.

From that very first night, that very first look, she’d known.

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